IN 1986 REINHOLD MESSNER WAS TREKKING IN A VALLEY IN TIBET, not far from the Mekong River, when he encountered what seemed to be “a bear with human abilities.” Shuffling forward, on two legs and yet huge, dark, and furry, the creature lunged toward Messner and then disappeared. In My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas’ Deepest Mystery (Yeti—Legende und Wirklichkeit, 1998), Messner documents this and other encounters with a creature resembling the elusive entity, known in Tibet and around the world, as the chemo, Sasquatch, or Bigfoot. The climber embarked on numerous expeditions to research the creature, and his encounter with the mysterious animal in 1986 may well have motivated him to continue these journeys. While this trip differed from other trips Messner took around the same time, as its object was to discover the truth about the romanticized yeti—rather than, say, to scale a mountain or to traverse a given inhospitable terrain within a certain timespan— Messner's generally realistic, if at times hyperbolic, writing style in My Quest for the Yeti is the same style he uses to describe his other journeys in extreme conditions and territories.

As with his travel writing about climbing mountains or traversing Antarctica, in My Quest for the Yeti Messner often depicts terrain in terms that strongly recall discussions of the sublime around 1800: words cannot adequately represent the ecstatic impact of his surroundings, and so, seemingly as a response to this awareness of representational inadequacy, he turns his (and our) attention to technicalities about trip preparation, climbing technique, or his feelings about the people who accompany him.

Although seemingly in frequent awe of the nature that surrounds him, Messner often simultaneously conveys a deep familiarity with the culture: wherever he goes, he seems to know at least some of the native inhabitants quite intimately, and he has what appears to be an instant affinity with others. When in Tibet, he also generally prefers to call the yeti by the name the indigenous people use for the creature: the chemo. Unlike Herzog, the director's alter ego Fitzcarraldo, or other figures in Herzog's films who travel extensively but arguably never really leave Europe behind, and who ultimately preserve boundaries between themselves and native peoples, Messner occasionally seems to think he can cross the line between European and non-Western civilization.